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[Tdol's Blog] Authentic English

In an interview on ELTNews on a recent visit to Japan, Professor Henry Widdowson says that the most obvious example of a conceptually flawed theory in ESL teaching is "the current precept that English teachers must only use real or...

Re: [Tdol's Blog] Authentic English

He suggests that authenticity doesn't now mean that there should be no selection, and that the criteria for selection should be based on perceived usefulness. Just going to a concordancer and ripping out examples is not meeting students' needs, he says. He also would question the approach taken by people like m*t*l56.

Re: [Tdol's Blog] Authentic English

Like most of those initially involved in the the Communicative approach, Widdowson clearly misunderstood the linguistics it was supposedly based on. The 'authentic texts/anguage' idea seems to come from the Conversation Analysis notion of 'natural language'. This idea/hypothesis proposed that attempting to create utterances/discourse for the purpose of analysis (therefore teaching) usually creates examples of very unnatural 'English', as it is merely for demonstrating a (analytic or pdeagogic) point. Thus one might say that those sentences dreamed up by teachers to illustrate grammar points are often unlikely to be found in any good corpus. EFL teachers should use texts (spoken or written) as large as their students can digest. All of us who really study English can say they are not constantly surprised by (good English) utterances they come across.

An enormous amount of nonsense has been written about 'authentic English'. But possibly the objections by teachers are often based on the fact that natural language texts generate students' questions which are difficult to predict and difficult to answer. To learn any language you need to take in and use (in conversation, emails, essays, letters, etc) huge amounts. The quick fixes are the educational equivalent of horoscopes. (Oh, and surprise, surprise, many EFL teachers seem to believe in horoscopes).

Re: [Tdol's Blog] Authentic English

I don't think that Widdowson was trying to denigrate the concept of authenticity, but is suggesting that to be pedagogically valid, the authentic language still has to go through filters. I think he was aiming at the less targetted approaches taken by some, not advocating a return to la-plume-de-ma-tante. He does say 'only', which, I think, suggests incorporation of (selected) corpus data, not a rejection of it.